Posts Tagged ‘Hindu’

Some readers of this blog are aware of my admiration for the late Dr. G.M. Mehkri (1908-1995) reflected in the 2009 tribute to him on this blog. In brief, I was impressed by Dr. Mehkri’s objectivity and the intriguing social hypotheses he explored with evidence, logic, and neutrality.

I had mentioned in the tribute that Dr. Mehkri had submitted a PhD thesis (The Social Background of Hindu Muslim Relationship) to the Department of Sociology at the University of Bombay in 1947. The subject, timing, and Dr. Mehkri’s credentials suggested this might be a manuscript worth reading and a search was launched to obtain a copy. The most likely source was the National Social Science Documentation Centre (NASSDOC) in Delhi, the archive for all doctoral dissertations completed in India. Unfortunately, the copy of Dr. Mehkri’s thesis was reported missing.

With the help of friends in India (Aakar Patel and Dr. Nasreen Fazalbhoy, retired Professor of Sociology at the University of Bombay), a copy was traced at the University of Bombay, not in the main library but at a remote location that housed fragile manuscripts. The document was not in a state that allowed photocopying but Dr. Fazalbhoy was kind enough to browse the document and communicate a synopsis of its contents. Needless to say, the entirely unnecessary hurdles placed in the way of academic exchanges between the two countries prevented anyone travelling to Bombay to pursue the matter further.

Very recently, friends in Pakistan (Kaleem Durrani, Ali Yawar and Ahmad Kamran through whose organization, Sangat, I had met Dr. Mehkri for the first time in the 1980s) located a typed copy of the thesis. It seems this was a copy Dr. Mehkri had himself acquired from the university a long time back with the intention of publishing it as a book. A look at the manuscript suggests it is the final or almost-final draft of the thesis – it has a University of Bombay seal but also includes a few hand-written corrections to the text.

Admirers of Dr. Mehkri have expressed the wish to fulfil his desire and make the thesis available as a book for wider dissemination. The task of undertaking the first reading and evaluation has fallen to me and I have decided it would be helpful to share my notes on this blog as I read each chapter. In this post I will summarize the preface and list the table of contents.

In the preface, Dr. Mehkri mentions that he became interested in sociology in 1940 and completed his thesis in the Bombay University School of Economics and Sociology under the supervision of Professor G.S. Ghurye (PhD, University of Cambridge, 1922). Dr. Mehkri mentions Dr. Clifford Manshardt, the founding director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and the author of the 1935 book The Hindu Muslim Problem in India, as a member of his dissertation committee. The dissertation was financially supported by the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust.

Dr. Mehkri writes in the preface that in 1940 when he started his program of study “[T]he communal situation in India had by now assumed serious proportions – to the extent of forcing the British Government to withhold the application of the Federal Part of the Constitution of 1935 to the government of India. Dr. Ghurye suggested that I may attempt to study the historical and social background of what then looked to many to be mere political agitation but in which Dr. Ghurye saw a good field of study in political sociology.”

Table of Contents:

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: A General Outline of the History of Pre-Muslim India
Chapter 2: Islam’s Contact With India
Chapter 3: Rise and Decay of the Muslim Power in India: A Brief Chronological History
Chapter 4: Early Muslims’ View of India and Indians
Chapter 5: Being a Brief History of the Social Relationship between the Hindu and Muslim Rulers from Akber to Tipu Sultan
Chapter 6: The Hindus and the Muslims of India after A.D. 1800
Chapter 7: The Hindu View and Way of Life
Chapter 8: The Muslims of India, Their View and Way of Life
Chapter 9: Some of the Outstanding Leaders of Indian Muslims
Chapter 10: The Question of Language, Script and Literature
Chapter 11: Muslim Mind as Expressed through the Urdu Literature
Chapter 12: Development of National Consciousness Among the Indian Muslims
Chapter 13: Conclusion
Appendix: Bibliography

Note

This table of contents strikes an academic of today as representing a mode of thought that has gone out of fashion. Modern approaches refrain from such broad generalizations as the Muslim mind or the Hindu or Muslim view of life which would inevitably lead to clash of cultures. Excessively chronological accounts and those based entirely on secondary sources are also not considered very rewarding.

I am anticipating what I am likely to encounter as I read the thesis but still believe there might be some details that would make the effort sufficiently rewarding. In any case, it is a rare chance to study a dissertation on this topic completed during the fateful decade of the 1940s and to understand how at least some academics approached their discipline and research at that time.

There are two aspects of an argument: its content and its construction. On this blog our focus is almost entirely on the latter; the only reason we have content is that we cannot do without it to construct an argument – an argument has to be about something. However, we have no material or emotional stake in the content; it is just a means to an end. In this post we explore in more detail the specifics of the end we have in mind.

There are at least three attributes of the construction of an argument that are critical: Credibility (whether the argument is supported by evidence); Coherence (whether the argument meets the tests of logic); and Consistency (whether the argument is free of contradictions). In order to illustrate these attributes we will resort to content provided by a participant in an earlier discussion. (more…)

In the previous three parts (here, here and here) we examined the long journey of Indian Muslims from the inception of a great common Indo-Persian culture in the 13th century to its political isolation especially by the end of 1930’s. By the time British rulers were fully engaged in World War 2, Muslims, with an acute sense of their separate identity that developed particularly in the backdrop of political events during 1920’s and 1930’s, were about to embark on a collision course with rest of the Indian people. Let’s discuss the key drivers of this great sea change in Indian politics as the British prepared to leave an independent India in the hands of indigenous people. (more…)

Bruised and battered as Indian women might be (psychologically, not physically as the poll on this blog suggests), there is another side to Indian femininity reflected in the myths of powerful goddesses. I came across an interesting perspective on this in David Shulman’s review (A Passion for Hindu Myths, NYRB, Nov. 19, 2009) of the new book by Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History:

Sometimes the history of India looks like a story about endless waves of virile invaders from the north-northwest – Scythians, White Huns, Afghans, Turks, and, most recently, the British – who slowly grow soft and decadent under the insidious influence of the dreamy, langorous, mystically inclined Hindus…. [But according to Doniger] India’s astonishing talent for absorbing and transforming the peoples pouring in from outside, seen through a Hindu lens, has nothing to do with any softening or melting down of a hard, preexisting monolithic culture; it is, rather an active process of selection and pragmatic recycling, with the female principle – mare, queen, dancing girl, or goddess – driving the rather helpless (often foreign) male. (more…)

I am grateful to reader Ganpat Ram for suggesting a new line of thought with the following comment on Emperor Akbar:

Every Muslim ruler with rare exceptions showed great concern to contain and push back Hinduism. Even the relatively broad-minded Akbar destroyed Hindu temples.

My response to Ganpat Ram was that this was one opinion in the spectrum of opinions and I recalled an article (East and West: The Reach of Reason) by Professor Amartya Sen published in the year 2000 in which a contrary opinion had been expressed. (more…)

I am posting this tribute to Aditya Behl here for a reason. His work epitomizes the kind of passion and painstaking effort that are needed to understand the nature of past relations amongst the various communities inhabiting South Asia today.

I heard him read a paper only once (in 2008) and had a brief exchange after, noting in my mind that this was someone I wanted to meet again. He was a person who left a mark very quickly – with his scholarship, his sense of joy in his work, and the excitement he communicated to the audience.

I am reproducing here a tribute by someone who knew Aditya Behl well with the hope that the introduction to his work will help us in our own understanding of the past and thus fulfill a goal that was dear to him.

******

… Then one morning Naim saab became the bearer of unsettling news, we have lost Aditya Behl. One of the most talented young scholars in his early 40s, Aditya became known for his work in Persian and Urdu but he was at home in many languages including Sanskrit, French, Greek and Hindi. Aditya was the bearer of intimations of being Hindu and Muslim, which are perhaps lost except to a few persons/communities in our times.

Dazzling in his scholarship, repertoire and bearing, Aditya had carved out for himself an area of expertise in the genre of Sufi romances. He was one of the successors to the scholarship of an entire generation including Annemarie Schimmel, Christopher Shackle, Carl Ernst, Bruce Lawrence and Simon Digby (who accompanied him on some of his travels).

I met Aditya for the first time at the University of Chicago in the winter of 1980-81. He was deeply into Sufi studies (much before the subject had become fashionable!). I was then distant from South Asian studies, and instead immersed in European theories of state formation. He spoke to me of the patronage of Mughal and Maratha rulers of Gwalior and Indore and the creativity of sufis.

Over the last twenty years my own area of interest has developed in Muslim identities in Persian/Urdu/Rajasthani texts and the Hindu-Muslim city and I have come to deeply appreciate Aditya’s understanding of facets of Hindu-Muslim relations. I was enthralled by his translation of Mir Sayyid Manjhan Rajgiri, Madhumalati: An Indian Sufi romance, done in collaboration with Simon Weightman and published in the Oxford classics series.

In the last decade our interests grew closer. He was also mining the medieval Rajput-Charan texts that I was using. When I convened a double panel on the Universes of Indian Islam for the Conference on Indic religions, which my colleague, Madhu Kishwar, was organizing, Aditya’s was one of the first names that came to my mind. Illness -presaging perhaps the present moment – came in the way of his participation.

In September 2006 he gave a Seminar at CSDS on the Dabistān-i mazāhib, an Encyclopedia of Religion. By then he was holding the chair of South Asian Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. It had been a long day at work, but the seminar was invigorating. I have in my notes of that evening the words, “As always I like his work and the way it opens up a vista.” The Dabistān-i Mazāhib is a 17th century text, “authored” by a Zorastrian who has a surface duplex identity with two names, Zu’lfaqar Ardistani and Husaini Shah. The author identifies various groups such as Zorastrians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims. The “Hindus” refer to a geographic category and include a variety of sects, Aditya pointed out. The Zorastrian group from Azerkhaiban had suffered persecution under the Safavids and had come to practice taqiyā-using the tools of the conqueror against them. Aditya read the text in terms not of identity but as difference. My question for him had been that instead of the incommensurable difference he read, the text suggested to me numerous encounters and conversations: the reference to yogic breathing and other techniques; the Prophet being described as a disciple of Gorakhnath who taught him yoga; the description of Sarmad’s identity who is a Jew-Sufi. There is a reference to divisions, of course, that China and India will send forces that will reverse the Muslim expansion! The larger picture is of the Mughal Empire with its imperial bureaucracy in place, its agricultural productivity and considerable prosperity, and hence, the movement of holy men. I debated with him later that material prosperity alone does not explain this movement, particularly when it comes to holy men in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. What one needs to know more about is the popular support for holy men, the interaction between the village/town and these figures. I recall on the occasion Shuddhabrata’s comments that the last group of Mutazzilites was in Patna and that this was a period conducive to the writing of such “encyclopedias.”

In the last few years Aditya had become interested in the figure of Nazir Akbarabadi (1735-1830), immortalized in Habib Tanvir’s play Āgrā Bāzār. Nazir, the proponent of the language of the street and the bazaar, the poet of the carnivalesque kite flying and Holi festivals, the portrayer of vendors such as the watermelon seller, and of the sensual. He presented his work at the Delhi School of Economics and later wrote it up in, “Poet of the bazaars: Nazir Akbarabadi 1735-1830.” This was published in A wilderness of possibilities-Urdu studies in transnational perspective, edited by Kathryn Hansen and David Lelyveld. Aditya in this paper is interested in the formation of the Urdu literary canon, how Nazir’s verse was seen as vulgar by Mustafa Khan Shefta, characterized as “psychological impotence” by Shamsur-rahman Faruqi and seen as distant from the “high-minded Islamic revivalism” of Altaf Husain Hali. His interest was in Nazir’s poems on pleasure and how it requires a sensual sensibility, quite anamolous for the Urdu canon.

Aditya, I miss you already, the many conversations real and imagined that we had and could have had. You opened for the English reader a magical, miraculous world of medieval Sufi poetry, the premākhyāns notably Manjhan’s Madhumālati, Jayasi’s Padmāvat and Qutban’s Mrigavatī. A glorious Sufic contribution to Hindavi, but also to Brajbhasha and Avadhi and of thinking beyond “religion.”

You were an exceptionally talented person and explored a beautiful universe. Now you know more than any of us, what its deepest secrets are, of fanā and baqā, and the truths of wahdat ul wujūud and Alakh Niranjan!!

It is sad that the history we are taught in our countries is so one-dimensional that even the thought that the ‘Other’ might be semi-intelligent (let alone great) makes people catatonic. The predictable reaction is either to impugn the motives of the writer or to find selective evidence to prove that the real blame rests entirely on the ‘Other.’ The alternative of sifting through the arguments on their merits remains alien, unacceptable, impossible, or just too tiresome.

The reason Jaswant Singh’s book has made such a splash is because he is a front ranking politician with a very high reputation for integrity (for which, read Strobe Talbott’s Engaging India) and belongs to the BJP, all of which make the story impossible to ignore. Otherwise, this is an argument that has been made before and forgotten. (more…)

What have we learnt from this extended discourse on similarities and differences? It is time for a recap and a summary.

We started with Vir Sanghvi’s angry pronouncement that Pakistanis and Indians were no longer similar; they may have been 60 years ago but by now ‘they’ were fundamentalist and ‘we’ were secular.

There were immediate rejoinders to this burst of annoyance with hurt pronouncements of sharing the same music and the same sports.

It became immediately obvious that there were two flaws with the framing of this discussion. First, human beings were not one thing or another; rather, they were better characterized as bundles of attributes. (more…)

In an earlier post we had referred to two very recent books that highlighted the crucial role of education in inflaming relations between communities in multi-ethnic and multi-national countries.

Some very candid comments by Vinod alerted us to the fact that socialization at home plays an equally important role in forming our opinions of others in the community – whether we see them as different from us and, if so, what values we attach to the differences.

This raises the obvious question of the relationship between socialization at home and education in schools. In searching for an answer, Dr. Meenakshi Thapan (Department of Scociology, University of Delhi) pointed us to the recent work of Latika Gupta on this subject. (more…)

let’s see what favors lovers find from idolsa Brahman has said that this year is good

This is indeed a very clever and witty she’r,as the interpretation at Mehr-e-Niimroz will make clear.The play is on the word but which in Urdu, in the context of the lover, signifies an extremely beautiful woman. But but also means ‘idol’, and that pairing with Brahmin is perfect in the second line. Who would be a better authority on the behavior of ‘idols’ than a Brahmin (who is an ‘idol-worshipper’ in the eye of a Muslim)?

[A digression. Here is Marco Polo on his stop in India on the way back from China in 1292 AD describing the people: They ‘pay more attention to augury than any other people in the world and are skilled in distinguishing good omens from bad.’ They rely on the counsel of astrologers and have enchanters called Brahmans, who are ‘expert in incantations against all sorts of beasts and birds.’]

Now consider the she’r as a totality: it is a comment on the myopia, the parochial self-interestedness of the lover. The astrologer has augured that this would be a good year and the lover immediately takes that to imply that the beloved would bestow favors upon him. For all we know, the astrologer could well be predicting that there would be no wars or terrorist attacks in the New Year. The astrologer may not even be aware of the existence of this particular lover. But the lover is only interested in taking the meaning that advances his suit.

But this is a layered she’r and this is where you have to acknowledge the genius of Ghalib. In 18 words, he rips the hypocrisy of human beings to shreds and leaves them naked, shorn of all their righteousness and moral pretensions.

Consider this as the classic interaction of two ‘Others’ – in this case, Muslim and Hindu. Now imagine a Hindu soothsayer offering to make the ultimate dream of the Muslim come true. How many Muslims would there be who would reject the offer because the benefactor is the ‘Other’, an infidel, an unbeliever, one who should be put to death instead?

Suppose instead that the two have a difference of opinion on the distribution of an asset. How soon is this likely to turn into an issue of historical injustices and oppression, of having nothing in common except an intense hatred of the ‘Other’s’ ancestors? How soon would there be cries to bomb the ‘Other’s’ entire community into oblivion?

So, Ghalib has proven it to you – there is nothing principled in these righteous positions that people take; the positions are taken in the service of selfish and parochial material interests.

[I am waiting for someone to come after me for being a Muslim-hater. Rest assured, the process of ‘Otherizing’ is entirely symmetric. Switch the religions of the soothsayer and the client and nothing much changes (or does it?) except that the story gets weaker – Brahmins, as Marco Polo noted, are justly reputed to be the best soothsayers with a greater knowledge of idols. From which, of course, follow the associations employed by Ghalib who knew such things well.]

And this brings us to the Partition in which a million people died and ten million had to leave their homes. It turned on a difference of opinion on the mode of governance that would best meet the concerns of all the stakeholders. It became a battle of the ‘Others’ who convinced themselves they had nothing at all in common after having lived together for a 1000 years, who were not willing to compromise on anything to prevent a million deaths.

We have mentioned in an earlier post that the situation in Malaysia was more complex – not only were there Hindus and Muslims but Chinese as well who owned most of the wealth. But people sat down and compromised and found a way out. It can be done. It can be done when we look upon the person across the table not as the ‘Other’ but as someone we would eagerly embrace if he offered to unite us with the beloved.